“Walking Away” by C-Day Lewis : Poetry Analysis

Explore the poet’s feelings as his son walks away from him, and the language he uses to share the impact of this moment with you.

To help you answer, you might consider:

· How the poet describes his son walking away

· The language he uses to communicate his feelings about parting from his son in stanzas three and four (lines 11–20)

· The effect of the whole poem on you.

The poem, “Walking Away” by Cecil Day Lewis encapsulates the experience of an intense separation of a father from his son as the young child inevitably matures and comes of age. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each, and features an irregular rhyme scheme that convey the unsettling, overwhelming effect of a sense of loss. In the poem, the poet uses a spate of visual and tactile imagery to convey his son’s walking as something inevitable, irreversible and almost cataclysmic. His feelings are conveyed as fairly subtle, but not without the desire to rein his son back in. Throughout the poem, the reader is led through the persona’s mixed feelings of desire for detachment and his unfortunate inability to let his son go, which he must do — ultimately.

Firstly, the poet’s persona struggles to maintain a neutral stance as he watches his son walk away. The words “I watched you play” and “I can see” convey the persona’s attempt to reassure the reader of his being an objective observer to the scenario. He paints a picture of a pleasant, “sunny day”, conveying a sense of lightness and happiness through the visual imagery. The repetition of the word “day” serves to reinforce this point. The persona, however, feels the beginnings of an emotional upsurge, conveyed through the image of “the leaves just turning”. Here, leaves represent the persona’s emotions, and the idea of them turning is indicative of change, not just of seasons, or emotions, but also change in life. It could also metaphorically refer to his son’s new chapter in life. Broadly, the symbolic brightness and light associated with the day is juxtaposed with a sense of heaviness and solemnity, so that the reader is left visualizing a day tinged with nostalgia.

This imagery gives way to another vision of change, more alarming in terms of magnitude: that of “a satellite wrenched from its orbit”. Slightly more tactile in nature, the image of a satellite being “wrenched” away seems to suggest that the son’s ‘walking away’ is sudden, unexpected, irreversible and rather uncommon occurrence. The implication is that the final trajectory of the said satellite is unknown. The poet seems to suggest that just as we expect natural satellites to stay in orbit, following the laws of the universe, we take our relationships for granted, expecting our loved ones to stay close, always. While one can imagine the son being just like the satellite, the world at large seems to be infinite and enormous as the universe and there is no telling where the satellite will go and what carnage it may create. There is a sense of anticipation and mystery bordering on fear as to the eventual trajectory and destination of the satellite and by extension, the son. Furthermore, the “small, the scorching ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay” is also violent, tactile imagery that suggests irreversibility; they also parallel the notion of a football match, a contact sport that is stereotypically associated with the male gender. It includes rough play — for which the son is leaving the parent. One gets a sense of the rites of passage that a child must go through to finally come of age and turn from society’s notion of a ‘boy’ to a ‘man’.

In this context, there is also a sense of helplessness — an inability to act upon the paternal instinct to protect one’s offspring, which is conveyed by the imagery of inanimate objects such as celestial bodies. Following thorough with such comparisons, the persona also compares the son to a “hesitant” figure leaving. The simile “like a winged seed loosened” from a stem suggests the alleviation of the son’s tension by virtue of the word “loosened”; furthermore, the poet’s comparison of the son to a “seed” suggests there is much potential within him waiting to burst forth like a sapling. The diction “winged” also suggested the son’s potential to go very far in life. There is nothing the father can do to protect his son from the inevitable blows that may befall him in the upcoming football match — which serves as an extended metaphor for the ordeals which he must face in life.

The regularity of the rhyme scheme and masculine rhymes used to reinforce the notion that the parting is marked by solemnity and an eventual sense of completion. The son’s walking away is definitely not the worst feeling for the parent, but a gentle awakening to the reality that both son and parent find themselves as a result of the “walking away”. It is the realization of the love, which was not tested until this point, which is “proved” in the “letting go” — the parent’s relinquishment of the paternal instinct to protect his son in favour of trust, and the son’s easy acceptance of the life that is independent of his father and his protection.